


Son I Loved You At Your Darkest

by transubstantiate



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-05
Updated: 2014-10-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 11:44:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 25
Words: 8,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1743524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transubstantiate/pseuds/transubstantiate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky's re-adjusting, re-learning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It’s her presence that unravels him. Her standing across the room, carefully neutral, eyes steady on him, though he can never catch her looking. He knows her, he remembers her lithe frame and incandescent hair. He knows her, and he doesn’t. Even more than he doesn’t know Steve. His memories of this red woman, this Agent Romanoff, are limited to flashes of light and heat, darkness and snow.  
"You shot her," they tell him. "In Odessa." But of course, he doesn’t remember that, either.  
It’s the nights that are the hardest, the silence and stillness. It matches the emptiness in his head, he muses bitterly. It’s the nights that are the hardest, the longest, and he’s unused to sleep, to the act, to the need, and his dreams are all nightmares.


	2. Chapter 2

There’s a new variable added a few weeks after he begins to settle into the house (prison) with Steve, Sam and Agent Romanoff.  
A man, who drops his suitcase by the door and goes to the fridge, helps himself to a water bottle, talking a mile a minute the whole time. Neither Sam nor Steve seem threatened by the man’s presence, though Steve does roll his eyes.  
The Soldier stands up from where he was sitting on the couch, and the man falls silent, looking him up and down.  
"So you’re what all the fuss is about," he says. "I gotta tell you, I’m not big on the idea of another metal guy on the team. Kinda my thing."  
"Team?" The Soldier asks.  
"The Avengers?" The man demands. "God, have you been living under a rock? Actually educating him is your job, Steve. Nice one, leaving out your current employment."  
"I’m not employed," Steve says.  
"Oh right," the man pauses for a moment to consider.  
"This is Tony Stark," Steve tells the Soldier in that brief pause. "He’s an inventor. He’s Howard Stark’s son."  
"Howard Stark?" the Soldier is confused, but he supposes that he better get used to things like this happening.  
"You know, Howard! He worked with us on…." Steve trails off, looking dismayed.  
"Hey, no loss," Stark says. "Pops was kind of a dick." He crosses the room and extends a hand to shake. When the Soldier doesn’t take it, Stark shrugs and claps him on the shoulder before turning to address Agent Romanoff.  
He doesn’t get to, though, because the Soldier stiffens at the unexpected physical contact, and the room stills.  
Everyone is staring wide-eyed, awaiting his next move.  
He sits slowly, carefully, forcing his muscles to relax, watching Agent Romanoff’s hand creep away from where it’s landed on her gun.


	3. Chapter 3

It’s his fault, really, for watching the movie. He knew that he wasn’t ready to see something so gratuitously bloody and violent, but Stark had insisted, and the Soldier was tired of arguing. Steve and Sam had gone out grocery shopping, and Agent Romanoff said nothing, choosing to watch Tony Stark railroad the Winter Soldier.   
He gets angrier and angrier as the movie progresses, at the inaccuracies and false violence. His left hand clenches tightly around the armrest of the couch, faded upholstery and old wood crunching under his mechanical hand.  
Her touch is feather-light, her fingertips barely brushing his shoulder, but he snaps, lashing out with his left hand, capturing and crushing her fingers. A split-second later, his brain processes the situation and releases her. He doesn’t feel stunned or horrified or anything like that. Just regret. And something he’ll call resignation.  
Because she doesn’t waste a moment in responding, executing a sweeping kick that knocks him off the couch and onto the floor, and then she’s straddling him.   
He looks up at her, meets her eyes. They glitter with more expression than he’s seen in them (ever? In a long time? He still doesn’t know.).   
Then, slowly, deliberately, she breaks eye contact to gaze at her broken hand. She stands, still straddling him, makes eye contact with him again, and drives her boot down on his right hand. The sound of his bones snapping is the only thing that breaks the quiet.  
She turns her back on him, just as slowly and deliberately, and leaves the room.


	4. Chapter 4

His hand heals quickly, bones and flesh knitting back together in just a few days. Hers takes longer, but only by about a week, and he wonders at this. He wonders if maybe humans developed while he was (out? Sleeping? Inactive? He doesn’t know what to call those missing times) unconscious, if Sam would heal as quickly, should the Soldier break him.  
And it would be easy to break him, so easy, because Sam is so trusting, so ready to see the good in an empty, broken relic.  
He finds himself planning, in his quiet moments, speculating about the best ways to get Sam alone, how to inflict the most damage in the shortest amount of time, before his shadow shows up again.  
Because he has a shadow.  
She follows him everywhere he goes in the tiny house, always present, never underfoot, always aloof, disinterested, never able to quite hide the way her eyes track him. He wonders what she would do if he did try to hurt Sam, or Steve.  
And some part of him (the reckless, thrill-seeking adrenaline junkie he as Brooklyn Bucky was so good at tamping down) wants to. It wants to get into a fight with her, to be reduced back to base instincts of survival. He can see it; the two of them locked in that beautiful, deadly dance. He can see her long legs spinning around and he can feel her arms around his neck in a chokehold and he can see himself flipping her off his back and onto the ground and god, her teeth are bared in a defiant snarl, her hair, that bright brilliant red, pools around her head, and…oh. Her shirt is riding up, showing an ugly scar splashed across her hip.  
"You shot her," they tell him. "In Odessa."


	5. Chapter 5

"Not gonna happen, Rogers."  
"Come on, Nat! He listens to you even better than he listens to me."  
"You’re not going to make me your old boyfriend’s glorified babysitter!"  
"You owe me."  
"Not this, Steve. Anything but this."   
"I need you to do this for me."  
The Soldier decides he’s heard enough and rounds the corner, stepping heavily to announce his presence.  
Steve and Agent Romanoff are standing very close to each other, nose-to-nose, but Steve springs back from her when he sees the Soldier.  
"Bucky," Steve greets him. His eyes are tired and his hair is messy, and the Soldier thinks that he might recognize this look, if it were on a man younger, less wise.  
"Barnes," Agent Romanoff says, irritation flickering across her features before they settle back into their standard calculating expression.   
"What’s going on?" The Soldier asks, and doesn’t miss the disgruntled look Steve flashes Agent Romanoff.  
"I was wondering if you wanted a haircut," Steve says. "You used to keep your hair much shorter."  
The Soldier runs his left hand through his hair, slow, considering. "Maybe just a trim," he decides.   
Steve looks disappointed. "Are you sure?" He asks, but the Soldier doesn’t reply, and Steve sighs. "Natasha? Could you?"  
Agent Romanoff scoffs. "Are you kidding?"  
"Nat," Steve says. "Please."  
She rolls her eyes. "Fine. When do you want it, Barnes? Now? Good, because I’ve got shit to do."


	6. Chapter 6

He decides to close his eyes, even though every instinct is screaming at him not to, to be on guard around her and her dangerous hands, her fingers like knives. But Steve is in the room, and he thinks that he probably trusts Steve. Maybe not Steve so much as Steve's desire for the Soldier's well-being, but the end result in this situation is the same.  
He flinches slightly when she touches his hair. Her muffled sigh is quiet, but he feels it in his bones, hears an echoing sigh from somewhere else, somewhere in the years he's lost.  
There's a clink as she puts down the scissors. "Can you give us a minute, Steve?" she asks.   
A pause, a rustle of clothing, footsteps, the door opens and shuts.  
"Bucky," she begins.  
"Don't call me that," he interrupts her. "It's not...I'm...just don't."  
"What do you want me to call you, then?" She puts her hands on the back of his chair; he can feel her fingers through the thin cotton t-shirt Steve bought him.   
"James," he whispers.  
"Ok. James," she agrees, and when he opens his eyes and looks at her in the mirror, she is sad and fearful, with a hint of another emotion that he can't put a name to before she smoothes her face back to neutral.  
"What were you going to say?" he asks.  
"It doesn't matter now," she whispers, and slowly, carefully places a hand on his shoulder. Their eyes meet for a long moment in the mirror before something that's not quite a smile touches the corners of the Soldier's lips.


	7. Chapter 7

He’s technically not allowed in the yard, since Steve isn’t sure who might be looking for them, but the nights are hard and the nights are dark and sometimes he sits on the back porch after he knows Steve and Sam are asleep. He doesn’t bother waiting for her to fall sleep; she’s always there, always awake. He guesses that she must sleep when he does, though she has an uncanny ability to still be awake when he falls asleep and to wake up before him. She must sleep. She must.  
He always leaves the porch light on during his illicit excursions even though it makes him feel exposed; he doesn’t like the stars.  
After he’s been sitting alone for almost two hours, she comes outside and sits down next to him.  
"Here," she says, and hands him one of the glasses she’s holding. He sniffs it suspiciously. Would she drug him? He has no idea.  
"Give me yours," he demands.  
"Not a chance, dorogoj," she says.  
"Why not?" he’s immediately on high alert.  
"Because this," she replies, taking a sip, "is grade-A straight from the mother country vodka, which you’re not allowed to have."  
He sniffs his own glass again.  
"It’s just water," she remarks, not looking at him. "I didn’t spike it."  
He sets the glass down delicately, like it’s a bomb, instead of drinking from it.  
She raises her eyebrows but doesn’t comment.  
They sit in silence until she raises her glass, considers it briefly, and then drains it in one go.  
"Steve wants me to be your handler when the time comes," she says. "That’s what we were arguing about the other day."  
"When the time comes," he repeats dully. "When I’m a weapon again."  
"It’s a long way off," she tilts her glass to catch a few more drops of vodka. "Also I told him no. It’s way too early to even be thinking about that for you, plus we’ve got no idea if you and I are even compatible."  
"What a relief," he quips.  
"You wouldn’t just be a weapon," she’s suddenly deadly serious. "You’d have missions, yes, but it wouldn’t be like before. Steve wouldn’t let anything happen to you."  
"Then why isn’t he going to be my handler?"  
"He’s busy. He’s Captain America."  
The silence between them curdles.  
"What should I call you?" he asks suddenly.  
"Natasha, I guess," she says bitterly. "That’s who I am for now. Natasha Romanoff, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Natasha Romanoff, gun for hire."  
"But what’s your name?" he presses.  
"Natalia. Natalia Alianovna Romanova. So very Russian, no?"  
"Natalia Alianovna Romanova," he repeats quietly, and he finds that he likes it, the way her name sings and dances on his tongue. "It’s beautiful."  
She cocks her head and looks at him, a faint smile lifting her lips. "You are a mystery, James Buchanan Barnes."  
"No," he says, "I’m a ghost."  
Her mouth drops open. "Was that a joke? Did you just make a joke?"  
He coughs once and picks up his abandoned glass. "I’ll never tell."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "dorogoj" means "sweetheart" in Russian


	8. Chapter 8

Steve doesn’t like guns, he remembers one day. An image pops into his head, out of the blue, of a heavily mustachioed soldier trying to force Steve to carry a gun, and Steve adamantly refusing, holding up his shield, saying, _This is all I need._ The memory is startling in its suddenness and clarity. The Soldier ( _James,_ he reminds himself) can practically taste the mud, can almost smell the gunpowder and unwashed bodies.  
When he describes this to Steve, the Captain’s eyes light up.  
"Yes!" he exclaims. "That was in Italy, when we first formed the Howling Commandos. Dugan couldn’t understand, said he wouldn’t go for it if I didn’t have a gun with me. He said I was a liability."  
"You don’t like guns," James says.  
"Not at all," Steve answers.  
James looks pointedly at the gun poorly concealed in Steve’s jacket.  
"A necessary evil, in this day and age," Steve says. "It doesn’t change the fact that it makes me uncomfortable."  
"Have you fired it?" James asks.  
"No," Steve replies firmly. "And I hope that I never will."  
James nods slightly. "I liked guns."  
"You did," Steve agrees. "You were always field-stripping your rifle. Cleaning it, I don’t know. You took better care of your weapon than any of the other guys."  
"Yeah," James says slowly, and he can feel the rifle under his fingers, hear the smooth clicks as he assembles and disassembles it so many times that he loses count.


	9. Chapter 9

_Kill it, ___he’s ordered. So he levels his gun, takes aim, and fires. But when he looks at the corpse, it’s Steve, skinny Steve from Brooklyn, and bile rises in his throat.  
 _Kill it,_ he’s ordered. So he levels his gun, takes aim, and fires. This time the corpse is a child, a girl, with fiery hair, and the gun drops from his nerveless grasp.  
 _Kill it, ___he’s ordered.  
But he can’t. He’s lost his gun, his will. And then he can’t move, held in place by ghostly hands on his arms, and he watches as a man lowers a gun and puts a bullet ( _Barnes_ ) into the head of Steve, every Steve, from the skinniest kid to the man they call America ( _Barnes_ ) and then he moves on to Sam, kind-eyed, gentle-tongued Sam, and then, _Watch this, Barnes, ___and the man turns to a woman, bruised and broken and bloodied, and she stares her murderer defiantly in the face before she too is snuffed out.  
"Bucky," the man says. "Bucky. It’s your turn. Will you wake up?" The man turns, and it’s him, it’s James Buchanan Barnes, with slick hair and dapper clothes drenched in blood and a twisted grin lighting up his face.  
And then, _James,_ and his eyes snap open and it’s her calling him back, it’s her standing in his doorway. He stares at her, and for once she doesn’t mask her eyes, doesn’t look away, and when he reaches out his arm she goes to him willingly, without hesitation, crossing the room in two easy strides, crawling across his bed to cup his face in her hands and rest her forehead against his, whispering "shhhh, shhhh, moy soldat, ne plach," and he doesn’t realize til then that he is crying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Natalia says "shhhh, shhhh, my soldier, don't cry"


	10. Chapter 10

He wakes up a moment before the door opens. Natalia is perched on the edge of his bed, watching him as his eyes crack open, as he stretches and wiggles his toes.  
"Sleep well?" she asks, a faint smile lifting her mouth.  
"Like a baby."  
Her smile widens.  
Someone coughs. James lifts his head off the pillow to see Sam leaning on the door frame sporting a knowing grin on his face.  
"How’s it going, folks?" he asks.   
"What do you need, Sam?" Natalia demands, without turning to look at him.  
"Just checking in," Sam says. "Also, do you have a bag packed?"  
"I packed one for him," Natalia replies.  
"Ok, good. Well, I’ll leave you two to…." and Sam trails off, shooting one last grin at James before he leaves.  
"Have we been made?" James asks once Sam has closed the door.  
"Not yet," Natalia answers, all business once more. "But it’s only a matter of time, what with all these stolen museum pieces in one house."  
His brain doesn’t catch the joke right away.  
"Your bag is in the closet," she says, standing. "You should probably look through it and see if you need to add anything."  
James meets her eyes and sees no warmth there (and he can’t pinpoint it, but this sudden coldness, this abrupt change from friend to other, is familiar to him), just an operative assessing a situation. She nods to him briefly before she too leaves, and he flops back on the bed with a sigh.

His pillow smells like roses.


	11. Chapter 11

She relaxes her constant attention after that; he doesn’t feel her eyes trained on him during his every waking moment.  
It’s strange, this new pattern they make for themselves, with Sam going in and out, to his job and his meetings (Steve starts tagging along to these), Steve and Natalia vanishing for a few days to return tired and a little bruised.  
James is never alone, though. They’ve set up a schedule that revolves around him, and he chafes a bit at this.  
He doesn’t like the constant supervision, the watching, the eyes (stars are like eyes, he thinks, stars are eyes that never close, stars are eyes that can see everything except light).  
It gets too much sometimes, and when he snarls at Sam one day while the other man is asking him about food preferences, Steve sits down with him, tries to talk to him, but James is gone and the Soldier wants nothing but to tear through the walls with his metal arm and return to being the ghost he was until a few months ago.  
It’s Natalia who reaches him, who tells him about loss and blood and torture. She tells him about emptiness, about nothingness, about drowning in thin air. And it’s the Russian, the hard rocky syllables that turn into a rough music that brings him down, her dry voice speaking his borrowed tongue.


	12. Chapter 12

Sam gives him a book about geology.  
"What is this?" James asks, holding the book with the tips of his fingers.  
"A book," Sam says.  
"I can see that," James replies. "Why are you giving it to me?"  
"You need a hobby," Sam explains. "It doesn’t have to be geology, but you should start thinking about it."  
"I don’t need a hobby," James says, putting the book down.  
"Hobbies help. They take your mind off the dark stuff." Sam pauses. "My group leader got me hooked on knitting, actually. After I got back."  
James laughs bitterly (he can feel the Soldier prodding his brain). "Do you really think your program can help me?"  
"I do," Sam says gently, ignoring the barbed tone.  
"Geology is not the answer," James says. "I don’t care much about rocks, beyond what they say about the environment."  
"Ok, so you already know a bit about rocks. What about archaeology?" Sam won’t give up.  
"Maybe," James says grudgingly.  
"It’s really interesting," Sam enthuses.  
James just grunts.  
"Sam! Nat!" Steve’s iconic bellow can be heard all over the house as he slams the front door open.  
Sam nudges the geology book closer to James. "Think about it, alright?"  
"Yeah," James says sullenly. "I’ll think about it."  
Sam nods and leaves to find what the Steve is so excited about.  
He hears Steve, Sam and Natalia conferencing in hushed tones in the next room, and try as he might, he can’t pick out more than a word or two, so he picks up the book and begins leafing through it idly. Despite himself, he finds that he actually begins reading it rather than just glancing over the pages.  
He’s a little startled when Natalia bursts into the room, but she stops short at the sight of him, just as surprised as he is.  
"What are you reading?" she asks suspiciously.  
"A book," James says.  
Natalia shakes her head. "Whatever." She crosses the room and starts rooting around in the closet.  
"What’s going on?" James asks.  
"We’ve been made," she snaps, yanking a duffel bag out of the closet and shoving it at him. "There was a guy tailing Steve all the way back here."  
"HYDRA?"  
"We don’t know, but we’re moving."  
"What’s the plan? A safe house?"  
"We’re splitting up. Steve and Sam are headed back into D.C., see if they can track down Hill. I’m taking you elsewhere."  
"Where?"  
"Boston."  
James raises his eyebrows. "You sure that’s a good idea?"  
Natalia lights up with a feral grin. "I like old cities."  
James tucks the geology book into his bag on the way out the door.


	13. Chapter 13

The bus they take from D.C. to Boston is a deathtrap on wheels. James has the option to sit next to the window, where he's completely exposed to outside view, or by the aisle, where he's completely open to every potential threat down the length of the bus.  
"Are you kidding me?" he hisses to Natalia.  
"My assets were frozen when SHIELD fell," she says, pushing their bags into the overhead compartment. "I don't have the money for a car rental and air travel was always out of the question."  
"Why didn't we just steal a car?"  
"Because then we'd have to dispose of it, which would just be a pain. Trust me, this is going to be fine. Probably."  
"Trust you?" he asks incredulously.  
"Well, you know," she shrugs. "Window or aisle?"  
He scowls at her and drops into the aisle seat, forcing her to clamber over him to get to her seat, which she does, gracefully and expressionlessly.   
The trip is mostly quiet, though it takes James a long time to stop flinching every time the bus rattles or someone comes down the aisle to go to the bathroom.  
"Relax," Natalia growls. "You're drawing attention."  
He shoots her his best I'm-the-Winter-Soldier-and-I-can-kill-you-a-hundred-ways-from-Sunday stare, but she just snaps her gum in his face, unperturbed.  
As much as he hates to admit it, she's right. Maybe breathing exercises will help. So he focuses inward, drawing his breath in and out deep and slow, regulating his racing heartbeat.  
He's almost something like relaxed (as relaxed as he ever gets, anyway) when the bus flashes through a small tunnel and is plunged into sudden darkness. He freezes, his hands snapping tight like vices onto the armrests.  
He's dimly aware of her speaking rapidly into his ear, but her words just blend into the low roar that occupies most of his cognizance.


	14. Chapter 14

It’s panic, this time, rather than the Soldier taking over. Disconnected nerves firing from all cylinders, images he’s not sure are real.  
He knows that this is all too good to be true. He knows it. There’s so many ways this could go wrong. Every time they go past another camera the likelihood of HYDRA locating them increases exponentially. He thinks that maybe all the past few weeks, as terrible and confusing as they are might just be another simulation, or an implanted memory, that maybe the woman next to him is his target.  
But no, she can’t be, she’d said his name, called him sweetheart, held him away from the demons in his head.  
She isn’t, he decides, and he clings to that, a thread of brilliant red running through the sharp grey panic.  
His foot, his foot is tapping absurdly fast, hard and out of rhythm and he knows people are looking, listening but he can’t stop and god if it were his arm he’d just take it off and they’d settle down and then he chokes on a laugh at his own morbid humor.  
He feels something, then. Sensation, stale air in his lungs as the world starts to settle back into place around him, as the panic breaks off a little.  
Natalia isn’t looking at him, but at some point she’d pried his hand off the armrest and laced her fingers with his. He studies their interlocked hands for a moment, then tightens his fingers incrementally and rubs the pad of his thumb along the outside of hers. She turns from the window and meets his gaze steadily, but she does blink when he delicately kisses her knuckles.  
He’ll make his own truths from now on, he decides, and he doesn’t let go of her hand until the bus pulls into South Station.


	15. Chapter 15

The weather in Boston is disgusting, hot and humid and heavy. His metal arm itches where it joins his body.  
Natalia just sniffs the air when he complains. "The weather’ll break soon," she offers. "And I like rain."   
"I like rain," James mutters to himself. "Hi, I’m Natalia and I like rain. I also like bathing in napalm and lighting my hair on fire."  
She pointedly ignores him, watching the threatening cloudbanks roll in with a little half-smile.  
It turns out that her apartment, while mostly bare of personal touches, is well-stocked with board games of all types. It also turns out that Natalia is terrifyingly good at almost all of them, as James learns when she dumps a stack of them onto the table that first night and demands that he play her for the bed privileges; loser sleeps on the couch. "For a week," she tries to tell him. "Privileges last for a week."  
"That’s ridiculous," he argues. "We might not even be here for a week."  
"Fine," she says, laying out the pieces for a game. "Three days."  
She wins, of course. It’s not even close.  
"Rematch," he says. "It was my first time playing."  
"I won’t give you a rematch," she says. "But I will teach you how to win."  
"Ok…."he says slowly.  
"And you learn best by playing!" she exclaims, and re-sets the board.  
By their third play-through, James is starting to get the hang of the intricacies of the game, and the fourth game they’re neck-and-neck all the way until the last turn, when Natalia wins. Again.  
"Good game," she says, leaning back in her chair. "Better with three people, but still good."  
"I could have won if I played my knight card during my last turn," James muses.  
"Possibly," Natalia says, reviewing the cards in her hand. "But I had five resource cards, which was more than enough to take the city, even with your knight against me."  
James sighs and tosses his cards onto the table.  
"Again?" he asks.  
"The storm’s about to break," she says. "Let’s go up to the roof."


	16. Chapter 16

"Have a beer," she says.  
"Is that allowed?" he asks.  
"C'mon, my house, my rules," she announces, tossing him a bottle she produces (from where he really can't say). "I say you can have a beer or two, provided you open them with your bottle-opener arm."  
He catches the beer, turning it over and reading the label. "You don't strike me as the beer type."  
She shrugs. "It's fine. Open mine."  
She tosses him another beer and he says absentmindedly, "You're a poet and I didn't know it."  
Natalia snorts.  
There's an awning and a couple of chairs on the roof, and James makes his way to the sheltered seating.  
"What are you doing?" Natalia demands. "You gotta experience it up close. Sit here." She drags two chairs over to the edge of the roof.  
It's not quite dark yet, though the colors of the sunset had faded before they made it to the roof, and Natalia flicks on a camping lantern for some light.  
"There's a ship in the harbor here," she says once they're settled. "The USS Constitution. It's the oldest commissioned warship still afloat. It was built during the American Revolution."  
"That's interesting," James says, slightly lost.  
"I like things that are older than me," she says. "Bits of history that cling to the present for all they're worth."  
James makes some affirmative noise and they fall silent while he digests this.  
The silence stretches on when he cant think of anything to say, and Natalia stands and chucks her empty off the side of the building. After a brief pause, James hears it shatter on the street below them.  
"Any minute now," Natalia says, studying the clouds.  
A drop of rain hits his arm and he glances longingly at the awning.  
He has to admit that watching the storm break is amazing. Seeing the sheet of rain roll in over the bay and across the city with startling speed is stunning, and Natalia (Nat, he thinks, and files it away for later) is dashing to and fro across the roof, drenched, drinking in the storm with her head thrown back, her laughter pealing out across the city.


	17. Chapter 17

Nights are still hard and long and lonely. He thinks that he probably isn't sleeping enough, that he must have permanent dark circles under his eyes, and when he looks at himself in the mirror, he sees a man haggard and scared, wreathed in shadows and scars.  
He doesn't like his reflection.  
Sometimes during the darkest nights he thinks about going to Natalia, and it can't be his pride that keeps him on the couch, because god knows that must have been one of the first things they stripped from him in the Red Room (or maybe it wasn't them. Not entirely. Maybe they only finished the work that Italy began) but something stays him. And there are nights he lies awake all through the dark hours with tears leaking silently down his face, desperate for human contact, knowing that he can't be trusted around normal people ever again.  
He wakes up one night in a cold sweat after dreams of teeth and dead children. He's fallen into a habit of leaving a light on in the kitchen, and he fixes his eyes on its soft glow and regulates his breathing, tries to think of nice things, but he can't find any brightness.  
This is another night where he doesn't sleep again, but instead of lying on the couch he goes and gets some water and sits at the counter with his hands wrapped around the mug, and it is thus that Natalia finds him in the morning, his cup still full, his eyes staring glassily into the distance.


	18. Chapter 18

She slides the cup out of his hands and places a mug of coffee in front of him before sitting on one of the counters, sipping some tea.  
He's intensely conscious of her, of her movement and her scent and her hair. He's eternally transfixed by its brightness, by its shifting shades of fire. He wants to touch it, to run his hands through it. He imagines that it must feel like silk, smooth and heavy, though it is so radiant that he wonders if it might burn him if he touched it.  
"Nat," he croaks, his voice hoarse from hours of disuse. "Nat, say my name."  
"James," she says softly.  
"I'm a monster," he whispers.  
"No more than I," she tells him, puts her tea down carefully and slips off the counter to cross the apartment to sit on the couch. "Come here," she pats the cushion.  
Reluctantly, he gets off his stool and follows her. "You know what you've done," he says.  
"Maybe," she says, tugging on his shoulder. He leans against her, and even though she invited him, he feels her tense up, so he starts to pull away, but her arms come around him and her muscles relax and then she's humming something, a lullaby, soft and sweet and sad.  
She teases her fingers through some of the tangles in his hair, and a little of the loneliness seeps out of him.  
"I don't know the half of what I've done," he whispers. "They wiped me again and again. I see the blood, though. In my dreams. I'm drowning in it." His face is wet.  
"Dorogoj," she whispers. "Yasha."  
"I'm sorry," he sobs, "I'm sorry."  
And she doesn't ask why, doesn't try to convince him he's got nothing to apologize for; she just cradles his head in her arms and whispers, "I know."


	19. Chapter 19

He gets up before her the next morning and makes breakfast. He might have been good with words once, but now he doesn’t know that many and when he reads sometimes they peer out at him from the page and wave like lost friends and he has to put down the book or the newspaper because he already has too many lost friends.  
So he makes her breakfast instead of trying to use words he doesn’t know anymore to say something he isn’t sure how to express.  
She’s surprised, when she pads out of the bedroom. (They call her the Black Widow, he thinks suddenly, but she moves more like a cat, all sinews and grace and half-completed thoughts.)  
She’s surprised, and maybe pleased, but either way she doesn’t say anything, just parks herself at the counter and waits for him to finish, her eyes tracking his every move.  
He tells himself the heat is from the stove.  
He serves her a plate of bacon and pancakes and eggs and offers her a mug of tea before making himself a plate of food and leaning against the counter in front of her.   
She picks delicately at her food and sips her tea.  
"I was thinking that we could go running," James says, pushing some eggs around his plate. "In the mornings, maybe."  
"Sure," she says. "Running’s not really my thing, but it would probably help burn off some steam."  
"Ok," James ducks his head and shovels some of the thoroughly stirred eggs into his mouth.  
"We should call Steve today," Natalia says. "Check in. See if he and Sam have turned up anything." She picks up her phone and scrolls quickly through her messages. "Are you…" she trails off as she looks back up at him.  
"What?"  
"You’ve got something," she says in a distracted tone. "Just here." And she reaches out to touch the day-and-a-half of beard on the right side of his face.  
Her fingertips are hot, burning, and her eyes are very, very dark.  
James’ heartbeat speeds up.  
"Some egg," she says, and her voice is low, husky. Her fingers don’t move.  
All of a sudden James becomes incredibly aware that he’s alone with possibly the most skilled assassin in the world, and he can’t consciously remember any of the training he received in the army or in the Red Room and he starts looking for escape routes and weapons while at the same time wanting this strange, tense moment to go on forever.  
He breaks eye contact and brushes at his beard, dislodging her fingers and the egg at the same time.  
"So when do you think we should call Steve?" She asks, her tone back to normal.  
"Lunch?" James suggests, and the moment is in the past.


	20. Chapter 20

Literally the first time they go out running a dog follows them home. Natalia swears up and down the street and tries to shoo the dog away, but when it’s still behind them when they get back to Natalia’s apartment building, James goes over to it and rubs its ears.   
It pants and grins up at him.  
Natalia lets out another string of curses, this time in Russian.  
James reads the tags on the dog’s collar. "Her name’s Genevieve," he reports, and scratches the dog’s chest. Genevieve thumps her tail appreciatively.  
"It’s like a goddamn Hallmark movie," Natalia says, walking closer to them. "Except the filthy beast already has an owner."  
Genevieve barks at her. Natalia stops in her tracks and glares at the animal.  
"Hey now," James rebukes the dog gently. "That’s silly."  
She quiets with a huff and licks James’ hand.  
"Mongrel," Natalia tells her.  
"She knows you don’t like her," James says. "She’s just looking out for number one. And that’s you, isn’t it," he rubs Genevieve’s ears again. "You beautiful dame."  
The dog barks again, but it’s a cheerful sound this time, and she wiggles all over and presses herself against James’ legs.  
Natalia scoffs and leaves, maybe closing the building door a little more firmly than necessary.  
"Don’t mind her," James tells Genevieve. "I guess she doesn’t like dogs. Though I can’t imagine why."  
It’s a while before he can manage to stop patting the dog and go inside, and once the door has closed behind him, he hears a plaintive whimper from beyond it and has to steel himself to walk away.  
"Wash your hands before you touch any of my things," Natalia greets him when he gets up the stairs. "I don’t want dog germs all over my apartment."  
"But isn’t the sink yours?" He asks. "How am I supposed to not touch anything that’s yours and also wash my hands?"  
"Don’t test me, Barnes," Natalia threatens him.  
He grins at her, a wicked, warm smile that’s more muscle memory than anything else.  
Natalia chucks a pillow from the couch at his head.  
He dodges, but into the bathroom.


	21. Chapter 21

She calls the terrible movies she makes him watch “necessary for re-integration” and throws pretzels at him when he objects.  
She puts on swing music and re-teaches him dances he used to know. He’s a quick learner. "Muscle memory," she says.  
Genevieve becomes a regular fixture on their early-morning runs, and when evening runs are added to the routine, she shows up for those too. James always makes sure to pat her or play with her for a few minutes before going back inside, and one time he plays for a full half-hour. When he finally makes it upstairs, Natalia points to the shower and doesn’t speak to him until lunch. After that he extends the time he spends with Genevieve, and eventually Natalia stops forcing cleanliness on him and even stays to hang out with the dog a few times.  
She lets Genevieve lick her once when she thinks James isn’t looking.   
They play board games with a cold, calculating, strategic fervor (James still hasn’t won once).  
He starts making her breakfast every morning. He’s up, usually, and the pleased little smile she wears when she sees him in the kitchen warms him, warms him all the way through, permeates the darkness he carries inside.  
They talk, they laugh, and she breathes more, and smiles more, and he watches tension bleed out of her when she comes back to the apartment and sees him sitting on the couch.  
He starts noticing little things about her; the way she steadfastly drinks tea but actually loves coffee, the way her hair is always flattened in a certain way when she wakes up, the way the corners of her eyes crinkle when she thinks something is funny but doesn’t want to admit it.  
He’s not quite sure how it happens, but one afternoon they end up on the couch, Natalia sitting up, reading some info from a packet that Sam had sent her, and James lying down, his head in her lap, her fingers combing gently, absentmindedly, through his hair. He’s listening to some jazz album that Natalia put on, finding himself in the bittersweet harmonies.  
He’s never been more aware of simply existing, of being present in the space he occupies. He flexes the fingers of his left hand and marvels at the smoothness of the action, ignores the little shocks of pain it sends up his arm. He counts his slow, steady breaths, his heart rate, the beats in a measure of the music.  
Natalia’s phone buzzes and her hand stills in his hair and he can almost hear her deciding whether to answer it.  
She picks it up off the armrest and hits accept just before the last ring.  
"Steve," she says crisply and then, warmer, "have you called Sharon yet?"  
James turns his face against her thigh and grins.


	22. Chapter 22

She throws the game. He knows that she does, he can see her decide not to win, but for the life of him he can't tell how she actually does it, because her tactics don't change at all.  
He even almost loses.  
"What was that garbage?" He asks when he's won.  
"I don't know what you're talking about," Natalia says, not quite concealing a smug grin.  
James rolls his eyes and pushes back from the table. "I'm going up to the roof."  
Natalia just shrugs and starts cleaning up the game, pointedly avoiding eye contact.  
The stairs seem longer than they did the first time he climbed them. He runs his right hand along the wall until his fingertips ache from contact with the rough concrete.  
The door out to the roof taunts him, with its glowing red exit sign and single slit, through which he can see semi-dark sky and the lights of the building across the street.  
He pauses, his left hand pressed against the door. Just a little more pressure and...his fingers come away of their own volition, leaving a perfect indentation of themselves behind.  
Unbidden, words leap to his mind, faint at first, but growing in strength.  
 _It's important to make a difference, Bucky. It's important that we leave the world better than it was when we were born._  
"What do you think we can do, Steve?" James whispers, eyes burning. "We are twisted and broken, the both of us together with the world."  
But the quiet, sure voice in his head has no answers, so he goes back downstairs without setting foot on the roof.  
Natalia is sitting on the couch, reading a book. She looks up when he enters, watches him go to the kitchen, sees him stand there for a minute, head in his hands.  
"Go to bed, James," she says. "Things will look different in the morning."  
"Sleep," James chokes out. "I never sleep."  
"You have the bed now," she replies calmly. "I put new sheets on and turned down the covers."  
He turns towards her, meets her steady gaze.  
"Go to sleep," she says. "Come find me if you dream."  
Later, he turns on the bed, tied up in the sheets, trapped in the coils of a many-armed man with a rubber bit and a spear that cast lightning through James' body and he smells sweat and death and fear, and there's red everywhere, bright and burnished, the loops of the handcuffs on his wrists are made out of hair (he's cold, so cold, there's frost growing over his eyes and all he can see is the crystals).  
He smells roses. They bloom over everything, over the ice, over the chair, over the bit and the man and the spear.  
His eyes blink open, slowly.  
"Nat," he whispers.  
"I'm here," she answers from the doorway.  
"Don't leave me."  
"I won't."


	23. Chapter 23

"Nat," James gasps. "Nat, stop."  
She turns around, still jogging in place. Up ahead of them, Genevieve barks at a squirrel. "What is wrong with you?" she asks.  
"I’m out of breath, woman," James snaps.  
"Well, don’t stop. Keep walking," she advises. "Put your hands on the back of your head. It opens up your lungs."   
"Can we just walk around the park a bit before heading back?" he asks, doing what she suggested.  
"I guess," Natalia says, and whistles for Genevieve, who gives them a disdainful look and sets off in the direction of her home.  
"Well fuck you too," James says, without vitriol.  
"You can hardly blame her," Natalia points out. "You’ve never looked more like an old man."  
"Rude," James says. "Rude."  
The park is full of dog-walkers and college students and elderly folk enjoying the late spring sun. James finds that he enjoys watching the way the various groups of people circle around each other and occasionally interact. He’s especially amused by one old man who goes from college student to college student, regardless of gender, and hits on them ridiculously.  
"I be he’s saying things like, ‘did it hurt when you fell from heaven,’" Natalia says. "Garbage lines like that."  
"Is that the worst you can do? I think he’s saying things like ‘if you were a chicken, you’d be impeccable,’" James says.  
"I think he’s being much bolder than that," Natalia muses, watching a heavily-muscled twenty-year-old man shy away from the old fellow. "What about ‘do you drink milk? it sure did your body good.’"  
"No, it’s definitely more like ‘i lost my teddybear, will you sleep with me instead?’ You gotta be right up front about what you want."  
She laughs out loud at that and asks "Do you wanna fuck, baby?" and he thinks it might be a joke from the assumed throatiness in her voice.  
"No," he says, and he closes the gap between their lips anyway. He can feel her surprise, but she recovers immediately.   
He reaches up tentatively and skims the knuckles of his right hand over the line of her jaw before sliding his fingers into her hair (and he was right, her hair is smooth and heavy, but it’s cold, so much colder than he expected) and she sighs a little into his mouth (and he knows that she’s a professional liar, but that sigh feels like some kind of truth escaping her).   
She answers by moving her fingers through his hair, and damn but he’s glad that he kept it long. He must have made some noise, because her grip on his hair tightens and her tongue flicks delicately, expertly into his mouth and…. And it’s too much stimulation and he can’t breathe; his vision’s going red behind his closed eyes as he pulls away, breaks the kiss.   
Her face is still turned up, her eyes closed, her lips slightly parted, and he’s afraid of her, of himself, of what he’s done.   
"I’m sorry," he says, and her eyes snap open as she slams her expressionless mask back down over features, but he’s starting to be able to discern between these faces, because they’re not quite as blank as she thinks they are, and this one, the one she’s wearing now, is the one she uses when she’s hurt.   
"Don’t worry about it," she says calmly, turning her gaze back to the park.


	24. Chapter 24

She’s different around him after that, in little ways that he thinks he’s imagining but can’t be sure about. She’s stiff when he tells a joke, but she never really laughed freely before, and she snaps more readily at Genevieve, but she was always short with the dog.   
He struggles to ease the strange tension that has sprung up between them. It isn’t until more than a week later that things come to a head.  
She stumbles in late one night, drunk and giggling at something the man she pulls after her into the apartment has said. He shuts the door behind them, crowding into Natalia’s space with a hungry, proprietary gleam in his eyes.  
She puts a hand on his chest and leans forward on her tiptoes and licks up the side of his neck (fuck, James thinks).   
Neither of them have noticed him where he leans against the kitchen counter (or no, she knows where he is. She always knows. He can see it in the way her shoulders tense, the way she angles slightly so that she can’t see him at all).  
He tucks his hand into the pocket of his sweatshirt and says loudly, "Hello."  
The man glances up briefly and then does an almost comedic double-take. "Oh, hey dude."  
"Sweetheart," James says to Natalia.  
She turns and offers him a nasty smile. He returns an equally unpleasant one.  
"Oh," the man’s face transforms into a whirlwind of uncertainty and confusion. "I-"  
"I think you’d better leave," James says.  
"Yeah."  
Natalia kisses him on the cheek before he leaves. As soon as the man is out of the apartment, however, her entire bearing changes. She straightens and her eyes clear and she even seems to smell a little better.   
"I need a drink, she says," crossing to the kitchen.   
"I thought…" James trails off.   
"Oh please," Natalia snaps. "You didn’t really think I was drunk around a complete stranger? I’m horny, not suicidal." She locates a bottle of vodka, unscrews the cap, and takes a massive gulp.  
"Natalia."  
"Go away, James."  
"Nat, slow down."  
She takes another huge swallow. "Or what?"  
"Or you’ll get alcohol poisoning."  
"No, I won’t. It is very," her voice quiets, "very hard for me to get drunk." She sits down at the table and takes another pull from the bottle.  
"Nat," he whispers.  
She glares at him. "Be quiet."  
So he’s quiet. He’s quiet, and he sits and watches her drink, and drink, and drink.  
"Your cities," she says, slipping into Russian as the alcohol steals her English. "Your American cities are so young. They pretend that they are old, but they’re just jealous little babies." She taps his nose with a finger and laughs.   
"You were careless, Natalia," he tells her in the same tongue. "What if that man had been HYDRA? He knows your location now, in any case. We need to move."  
"James," she says, putting a hand on the side of his face. "You are absolutely right."   
"And what if he was HYDRA? What if he’d drugged you or hurt you or killed you?"   
"To the first, you would have found me. To the second, you would have protected me. To the third," she puts her other hand on his face too. "You would have avenged me."   
He puts his own hands over hers, eases them off his face and onto the table, but doesn’t let go. "Are you sure about that?"  
She smiles, crooked and heartbreaking. "Not in the slightest, dorogoj."


	25. Chapter 25

The whisper comes somewhere around three in the morning.  
"Are you asleep?"  
She already knows the answer to that.  
"No."  
"Good."  
The bed dips slightly as she sits down on it.  
There’s a few long minutes of silence, and then she swings across him and leans down, meeting his eyes, studying his expression.  
He opens his mouth to say something, her name, probably, but she surges forward and cuts him off with a kiss.  
It’s terrifying, just like last time, but it’s also warm and firm and when she pulls away, he follows her, his eyes half-closed.  
Her hand on his chest, pushing him back.  
Her weight slides off his chest and she stretches out on the mattress next to him.  
He rolls onto his side and finds his nose inches away from hers.  
"Hey," he whispers. and she laughs, a surprised little sound. She reaches out, touches his face, sketches the line of his jaw.  
"You were there," she whispers, her fingertips, feather light, tracing his cheekbones, his lips. "You were in the Red Room. They think that I don’t remember, but I do."  
Her hands, her proximity, the raw tone in her voice are all distressingly intimate, and he swallows hard as he asks, "what do you remember, Nat?"  
"I think sometimes that I never saw you, that you were just a spectre used to scare little girls into line. But then other times I remember you, your face and your eyes and the sound of your voice and you were close to me. You frightened me. In all the memories that I have of you, even the ones where we’re close, I am afraid."  
"Nat," he whispers.   
"But I don’t know. I don’t know what’s real or not. They put…they put memories in." Her hands find his hair and pull his face closer to hers, until their noses are brushing and his eyes can’t focus on her. "Who are you?"  
"I don’t know," he whispers. "I don’t remember you. Or I do. I remember your hair."  
She chokes on a hard sob.  
"Nat," he says again, helpless, and she nestles against him, presses her face into his chest, and if the fabric of his shirt gets damp, he’s only glad.  
"Do you trust me?" he whispers when he thinks she’s asleep, because he’s not sure he wants to hear the answer. Her eyes flicker open and she reaches out, takes his hand, places it under her shirt on the scar on her hip.   
"You shot me," she tells him. "In Odessa."


End file.
